Phonological variation in lexical access: Abstractness, inference and english place assimilation

Abstract

Phonological variation in the phonetic form of words is a challenge to theories of lexical access and speech perception. This paper reviews some recent research on English place assimilation (e.g. sweet articulated as sweep in the environment sweet boy), evaluating an account of variation in terms of abstract, underspecified lexical form representations. An initial gating study confirms that potentially assimilated forms (surface velar or labial stops) are perceptually more ambiguous than coronal stops, which cannot be derived through assimilation from a following consonant. A second set of studies, using repetition-priming tasks with isolated words, finds little direct evidence to support a pure representational hypothesis, where place assimilated features are mapped onto underspecified representations at the lexical level. A final set of studies, looking at assimilated tokens in sentence contexts, finds evidence both for a representational account and for a determining role played by processes of phonological inference, operating over the phonological context in which variation occurs. This leads to a hybrid account where abstract lexical representations can be contacted directly by varying phonetic forms, but where further interpretation requires on-line processes of context-sensitive inference.